Keyword: growth
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Forget about the 1 percent versus the 99 percent. It’s really more like the 0.000001 percent versus everybody else. A tiny group — mostly comprising the Obama White House, a bunch of Washington Democrats, progressive economists, and the media elite — continues to fixate on income inequality as America’s greatest challenge. Most everybody else, the 99.999999 percent, sees things differently. Surveys continue to show Americans most worried about jobs and economic growth, not the income gap between the top and bottom. It’s a rational view given new employment data from the government. The January jobs report showed only 113,000 net...
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Robust household spending and rising exports kept the U.S. economy on solid ground in the fourth quarter, but stagnant wages could chip away some of the momentum in early 2014. Gross domestic product grew at a 3.2 percent annual rate, the Commerce Department said on Thursday, in line with expectations. While that was a slowdown from the third-quarter's brisk 4.1 percent pace, it was a far stronger performance than earlier anticipated and was welcome news in light of a 0.3 percentage point drag from October's partial government shutdown and a much smaller contribution to growth from a restocking by businesses....
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Oklahoma is back on track to reduce its personal income tax and make sure it remains economically competitive. Last year, Oklahoma legislators voted to reduce the state’s personal income tax from 5.25 percent to 5 percent starting January 1, 2015. There was also a provision to lower the income tax further to 4.85 percent in 2016 if certain revenue targets are met. Governor Fallin signed the measure into law and Oklahoma became one of eighteen states to cut taxes during the 2013 legislative session. Unfortunately, the tax cut package was ultimately ruled unconstitutional by the Oklahoma Supreme Court. The package...
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In 1900, we had no airplanes, no computers, no cellphones, no internet. We had only rudimentary versions of cars, trucks, telephones, even cameras.But in the last century, 1900 to 2000, as Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon report in their underappreciated work, It’s Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years, real per capita GDP in the U.S. grew by nearly 7 times, meaning the American standard of living grew by that much as well. The authors explain,“It is hard for us to imagine, for example, that in 1900 less than one in five homes...
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The U.S. economy has performed better since World War II when the president is a Democrat rather than a Republican, two prominent Princeton University economists conclude. The reasons, they say, involve more luck than successful policies. Over the past 64 years and 16 presidential terms, the U.S. grew at an average rate of 4.35% when a Democrat was in the White House and at a 2.54% when a Republican was, a gap the economists call “astoundingly large.” The research was done by Alan Blinder, a macroeconomist who served in the Clinton White House and has advised several Democratic candidates, and...
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The Chicago Fed’s President Charles Evans sent this Tweet today: #CharlesLEvans our purchases will continue to be open ended. We may need to purchase 1.5 trillion in assets until January 2015. Well, that’s not good. Although he is only one person, this seems to be the mindset of soon-to-be-Fed Chair Janet “Bubbles” Yellen. This is a statement about how markets are addicted to the sugar high of easy money and declining expectations of inflation (at least how the Federal government measures it). In other words, lethargic growth is in our economic future. Here is a chart on nominal GDP growth...
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Switzerland’s left-wing party has instigated a referendum for November 24 that asks voters to limit pay ranges so that a company wouldn’t be able to pay top employees more than 12 times what they’re paying their lowest-level employees. I talked with Neil Cavuto about this proposal and made several (hopefully) cogent points. Since Swiss voters already have demonstrated considerable wisdom (rejecting a class-warfare tax proposal in 2010 and imposing a cap on government spending in 2001), I predicted they will reject the plan. And I pointed out that Switzerland’s comparatively successful system is a result of not letting government have...
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Here's What Economic Growth Looks Like, in 3 Charts: There's no doubt that the government shutdown caused unnecessary damage to the economy in October. But there's still a good story to tell: The economy is growing steadily. Here's what that looks like. 7.8 million private sector jobs have been added to the economy in just 44 months (see chart 1)! http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/longform_economy_111213_816_0.jpg Real economic growth averaging 2.3%! (see chart 2) http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/longform_economy_111213_816_0.jpg The 2013 deficit is just half of what Obama inherited from Bush! (see chart 3) http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/longform_economy_111213_816_0.jpg http://www.whitehouse.gov/share/economic-growth-in-three-charts?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=email259-graphic&utm_campaign=econ
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Rosstat recently released their latest batch of demographic statistics. Nothing particularly bizarre or unexpected happened, but the data show that births have held steady at their 2012 level while deaths have modestly decreased. This means that, if the trends from the January-September period are maintained for the entirety of 2013, Russia will record natural population growth of roughly 13,000, its first natural population growth since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now in one sense natural growth of 13,000 out of a total population of 143,000,000 sounds puny and unimpressive. However, as I never tire of reminding people, it wasn’t...
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In his remarks to the Robert L. Bartley Gala Dinner on October 23, Senator Ted Cruz disparaged the notion of a “grand bargain,” which would raise taxes and (supposedly) cut spending. Cruz went on to say: “ “I’m going to tell you my view, which is I think that we ought to be relentlessly, tirelessly, exclusively focused on growth, because every other priority we have depends on growth.”(continued)
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Federal Reserve extended its support for a slowing U.S. economy on Wednesday, sounding a bit less optimistic about growth and saying it will keep buying $85 billion in bonds per month for the time being. In announcing the widely expected decision, Fed officials nodded to weaker economic prospects due in part to a fiscal fight in Washington that shuttered much of the government for 16 days earlier this month. The Fed indicated the recovery in housing had lost some steam, while noting some reversal in a recent spike in borrowing costs. "Available data suggest that household...
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Only two other states had better economic growth than Wisconsin in July, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Each month the bank takes into account key economic indicators as well as unemployment and the average number of hours worked before making a judgment on economic growth. For the second month in a row, the numbers were so good they were way above the national average. Despite what liberals want you to think, Wisconsin's economy is getting better and the numbers prove it. More people are investing money in their businesses and more Wisconsinites are getting back to work....
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The world’s biggest and most dynamic economy derives its strength and resilience from its geographic diversity. Economically, at least, America is not a single country. It is a collection of seven nations and three quasi-independent city-states, each with its own tastes, proclivities, resources and problems. These nations compete with one another–the Great Lakes loses factories to the Southeast, and talent flees the brutal winters and high taxes of the city-state New York for gentler climes–but, more important, they develop synergies, albeit unintentionally. Wealth generated in the humid South or icy northern plains benefits the rest of the country; energy flows...
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College began across the country last week. Opportunists associated with the higher-education establishment took the occasion to engage in special pleading. First was the leader of the organization most on the hook for higher ed, the federal government. Last year, the feds dished out $112 billion on student loans, an amount nicely equal to the combined endowments of all eight of the Ivy League universities plus Stanford. Grants to universities for research and other federal higher-ed handouts amounted to another $50 billion. The total is hard to measure, in that all sorts of federal agencies exist to funnel money to...
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A comprehensive demographic study of more than 200 countries finds that there are 2.18 billion Christians of all ages around the world, representing nearly a third of the estimated 2010 global population of 6.9 billion. Christians are also geographically widespread – so far-flung, in fact, that no single continent or region can indisputably claim to be the center of global Christianity. A century ago, this was not the case. In 1910, about two-thirds of the world’s Christians lived in Europe, where the bulk of Christians had been for a millennium, according to historical estimates by the Center for the Study...
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Worries about post-traumatic stress have become a stock part of the media narrative surrounding tragedies like Boston and Newtown. And resilience is supposedly the best we can hope for in the face of adversity. But what if there’s a third option? The story of one mass shooting, and the surprising tug of post-traumatic growth.
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Maybe the problem is that the topic has something to do with sex. Fertility is always about sex, although sex is not always about fertility. Maybe that’s what makes everyone so tense when demographics is raised as a possible factor in the economic woes of the nation. Or maybe it’s not sex at all: perhaps there’s something else which keeps economists and financial analysts (except for a small number of specialists) from talking about population issues when they look at economic growth and investment risk levels. After all, we don’t seem reticent about sexually-related topics the rest of the...
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Californians are fleeing the center of their big cities while suburbs are suffering from slow growth. If it were not for international in-migration, California’s older big cities would be suffering from population decline the same as Detroit. Texas has become the “New California” by figuring out the formula to sustain the population of its older city centers while its suburbs are booming at the same time.
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As Europe ends another week comfortably in the green (near all-time highs) - the short answer - not many...as the region's longest recession in history rolls on...
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The US economy and baseball player Josh Hamilton have something in common: they are both in a big slump! The first quarter GDP numbers are in and it is not good: "The bad news is that this recovery is still half the pace of the normal expansion. The Joint Economic Committee reports that if the economy had grown at the typical pace coming out of recession, at this stage GDP would be closer to $17.4 trillion. This $1.4 trillion growth deficit is roughly the size of the combined annual production of Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2011." (WSJ) Translation: We...
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